Trisha's eyes flew wide open and she listened for the next ten minutes, long after WCAS had reverted, like someone with unbreakable bad habits, to country music and NASCAR reports. She was lost in the woods. It was official.
Soon they would swing into action, whoever they were - the people, she supposed, who kept the helicopters ready to fly and the bloodhounds ready to sniff. Her mother would be scared to death... and yet Trisha felt a small strange trickle of satisfaction when she considered that likelihood.
I wasn't supervised, she thought - not without self-right-eousness.
CHAPTER 4
I'm just a little kid and I wasn't properly supervised.
Also if she gives me hell I'll just say "You wouldn't stop arguing and finally I couldn't stand it anymore." Pepsi would like that; it was just so V. C. Andrews.
At last she turned the Walkman off, rewrapped the head-phone wire, gave the black plastic case a perfectly unself-conscious smooch, and tucked it lovingly back into its pocket. She eyed the mashed-up lunchbag and decided she couldn't bring herself to look inside and see what shape the tuna sandwich and the remaining Twinkie might be in. Too depressing. A good thing she'd eaten her egg before it could turn into egg salad. That thought probably deserved a gig-gle, but there were apparently no giggles in her; the old giggle-well, which her mother believed inexhaustible, seemed to have temporarily gone dry.
Trisha sat on the bank of the little stream, which was less than three feet across here, and disconsolately ate potato chips, first out of the burst chip-bag and then plucking them off her lunch-sack and finally dredging the smallest fragments out of the bottom of her pack. A big bug droned past her nose and she cringed from it, crying out and raising a hand to protect her face, but it was only a horsefly.
At last, moving as wearily as a woman of sixty after a hard day's work (she felt like a woman of sixty after a hard day's work), Trisha replaced everything in her pack - even the shattered Gameboy went back in - and stood up.
Before rebuckling the flap, she took off her poncho and held it up in front of her. The flimsy thing hadn't been any pro-tection in her slide down the slope, and now it was torn and flapping in a way she would have considered comic under other circumstances - it looked almost like a blue plastic hula skirt - but she supposed she'd better keep it. If noth-ing else, it might protect her from the bugs, which had reformed their cloud around her hapless head. The mosqui-toes were thicker than ever, no doubt drawn by the blood on her arms. They probably smelled it.
"Yug," Trisha said, wrinkling her nose and waving her cap at the cloud of bugs, "how gross is that?" She tried to tell herself she ought to be grateful she hadn't broken her arm or fractured her skull, also grateful that she wasn't allergic to stings like Mrs. Thomas's friend Frank, but it was hard to be grateful when you were scared, scratched, swollen, and generally banged up.
She was putting the rags of her poncho back on - the pack would come next - when she looked at the stream and noticed how muddy the banks were just above the water.
She dropped to one knee, wincing as the waist of her jeans chafed against the wasp-stings above her hip, and took up a fingerful of pasty brown-gray gluck. Try it or not?
"Well, what can it hurt?" she asked with a little sigh, and dabbed the mud on the swelling above her hip. It was bless-edly cool, and the itchy pain diminished almost at once.
Working carefully, she dabbed mud on as many of the stings as she could reach, including the one which had puffed up beside her eye. Then she wiped her hands on her jeans (both hands and jeans considerably more battered now than they had been six hours ago), donned her torn poncho, then shrugged into her pack. Luckily, it lay without rubbing against any of the places where she'd been stung. Trisha began walking beside the stream again, and five minutes later she re-entered the woods.
She followed the stream for the next four hours or so, hearing nothing but twitting birds and the ceaseless drone of bugs. It drizzled for most of that time, and once it show-ered hard enough to wet her through again even though she took shelter under the biggest tree she could find. At least there was no thunder and lightning with the second down-pour.